Pola explorer

Leos Carax's next effort might be a light comedy with Cameron Diaz or a tragic film about Russia and America.

by Peter Keough

It might not have been a conscious plan, but the career of French filmmaker Leos Carax has eerily paralleled that of his idol, Herman Melville. Melville's early seafaring novels were hits; Carax's first two youthful films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Bad Blood (1986), were greeted with enthusiasm. But with his third film, Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Carax collided with his own Great White Whale. Costly and condemned by critics, it sunk out of sight, not to be released in this country until last year. Undaunted, Carax chose for his next project an adaptation of Melville's Pierre; or the Ambiguities, which, written after Moby Dick, was an even greater critical and commercial disaster for the author. Was the enigmatic director tempting fate?

"No," he replies tersely over the phone from Paris. "I don't think in terms of career. I'm not a cinéaste, really. I don't make film after film. I've made only four films in 20 years. Every once in a while I wake up and make a movie."

In this case, he woke up from a nightmare of bombers blowing up cemeteries, an image that he re-created in the film's startling opening sequence. "To start a project, for me there has to be at least one coincidence. The project cannot be just a dream or a good idea. It's like editing -- there has to be two things at least. Here the coincidence was that I had this book I read when I was 19 and I was thinking of adapting it 12 years later, at the same age as Melville when he wrote it. But I thought, I'd never find the boy and the girl to act in this film. And one day I saw a few images on a screen in Berlin of a woman's face. I thought, this was Isabelle. I found out she was a Russian actress [Katerina Golubeva]. I thought the film was beautiful and the girl was wonderful, and I thought I had Isabelle. But there was a problem -- this is a French film and the girl is Russian. What can I do with that?

"A year or two later I accepted an invitation to go to Sarajevo during the war to present Lovers on the Bridge. I had been sick for three years so I didn't go, but in '94 I did go: I went for five days and I stayed five months. For the first time I understood a bit about the war. When I came back, I had a dream that is the opening of the film. Planes dropping bombs on these cemeteries. And I woke up and thought, this war is like both modern wars and very old barbaric wars. It's not enough to kill the living people -- they have to kill the dead, too. And I imagined that Isabelle, the girl in the film, could actually be a creature who comes out of these graves and comes toward the camera like a phantom. I had this image. So I had a book, a girl, and a war. I could start working."

One thing Carax admits he lacked was Melville's sense of irony. That was not always the case. "I never see my films again, but a few months ago I was away, and on the foreign TV I saw my first film, Boy Meets Girl, about 10 minutes of it. And I was very surprised that there were attempts at being funny. I guess in my last films there is no humor, or very little. But it could come back. I don't think it's something I lost. I started making films at the same time I was discovering films, which is not often the case. Usually people go to school to learn, or they work as assistants or something. I discovered film and three weeks later I was shooting, and I was shooting my first feature. So these first two films are really a young man's films, a young man playing."

Carax may be more playful in his next project, which he hopes to make in English.

"I'm very ambivalent. I want to do a light comedy with Cameron Diaz or do a tragic film on Russia and America called War and Punishment."